Monday, August 31, 2015

Oliver Sacks: Sabbath

By OLIVER SACKS AUG. 14, 2015

MY
mother and her 17 brothers and sisters had an Orthodox upbringing — all
photographs of their father show him wearing a yarmulke, and I was told
that he woke up if it fell off during the night. My father, too, came
from an Orthodox background. Both my parents were very conscious of the
Fourth Commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”), and
the Sabbath (Shabbos, as we called it in our Litvak way) was entirely
different from the rest of the week. No work was allowed, no driving, no
use of the telephone; it was forbidden to switch on a light or a stove.
Being physicians, my parents made exceptions. They could not take the
phone off the hook or completely avoid driving; they had to be
available, if necessary, to see patients, or operate, or deliver babies.

We
lived in a fairly Orthodox Jewish community in Cricklewood, in
Northwest London — the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the greengrocer,
the fishmonger, all closed their shops in good time for the Shabbos, and
did not open their shutters till Sunday morning. All of them, and all
our neighbors, we imagined, were celebrating Shabbos in much the same
fashion as we did.

Around
midday on Friday, my mother doffed her surgical identity and attire and
devoted herself to making gefilte fish and other delicacies for
Shabbos. Just before evening fell, she would light the ritual candles,
cupping their flames with her hands, and murmuring a prayer. We would
all put on clean, fresh Shabbos clothes, and gather for the first meal
of the Sabbath, the evening meal. My father would lift his silver wine
cup and chant the blessings and the Kiddush, and after the meal, he
would lead us all in chanting the grace.

On
Saturday mornings, my three brothers and I trailed our parents to
Cricklewood Synagogue on Walm Lane, a huge shul built in the 1930s to
accommodate part of the exodus of Jews from the East End to Cricklewood
at that time. The shul was always full during my boyhood, and we all had
our assigned seats, the men downstairs, the women — my mother, various
aunts and cousins — upstairs; as a little boy, I sometimes waved to them
during the service. Though I could not understand the Hebrew in the
prayer book, I loved its sound and especially hearing the old medieval
prayers sung, led by our wonderfully musical hazan.

All
of us met and mingled outside the synagogue after the service — and we
would usually walk to the house of my Auntie Florrie and her three
children to say a Kiddush, accompanied by sweet red wine and honey
cakes, just enough to stimulate our appetites for lunch. After a cold
lunch at home — gefilte fish, poached salmon, beetroot jelly — Saturday
afternoons, if not interrupted by emergency medical calls for my
parents, would be devoted to family visits. Uncles and aunts and cousins
would visit us for tea, or we them; we all lived within walking
distance of one another.

The
Second World War decimated our Jewish community in Cricklewood, and the
Jewish community in England as a whole was to lose thousands of people
in the postwar years. Many Jews, including cousins of mine, emigrated to
Israel; others went to Australia, Canada or the States; my eldest
brother, Marcus, went to Australia in 1950. Many of those who stayed
assimilated and adopted diluted, attenuated forms of Judaism. Our
synagogue, which would be packed to capacity when I was a child, grew
emptier by the year.

I
chanted my bar mitzvah portion in 1946 to a relatively full synagogue,
including several dozen of my relatives, but this, for me, was the end
of formal Jewish practice. I did not embrace the ritual duties of a
Jewish adult — praying every day, putting on tefillin before prayer each
weekday morning — and I gradually became more indifferent to the
beliefs and habits of my parents, though there was no particular point
of rupture until I was 18. It was then that my father, inquiring into my
sexual feelings, compelled me to admit that I liked boys.

“I haven’t done anything,” I said, “it’s just a feeling — but don’t tell Ma, she won’t be able to take it.”

He did
tell her, and the next morning she came down with a look of horror on
her face, and shrieked at me: “You are an abomination. I wish you had
never been born.” (She was no doubt thinking of the verse in Leviticus
that read, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman,
both of them have committed an abomination: They shall surely be put to
death; their blood shall be upon them.”)

The matter was never mentioned again, but her harsh words made me hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and cruelty.

After
I qualified as a doctor in 1960, I removed myself abruptly from England
and what family and community I had there, and went to the New World,
where I knew nobody. When I moved to Los Angeles, I found a sort of
community among the weight lifters on Muscle Beach, and with my fellow
neurology residents at U.C.L.A., but I craved some deeper connection —
“meaning” — in my life, and it was the absence of this, I think, that
drew me into near-suicidal addiction to amphetamines in the 1960s.

Recovery
started, slowly, as I found meaningful work in New York, in a chronic
care hospital in the Bronx (the “Mount Carmel” I wrote about in
“Awakenings”). I was fascinated by my patients there, cared for them
deeply, and felt something of a mission to tell their stories — stories
of situations virtually unknown, almost unimaginable, to the general
public and, indeed, to many of my colleagues. I had discovered my
vocation, and this I pursued doggedly, single-mindedly, with little
encouragement from my colleagues. Almost unconsciously, I became a
storyteller at a time when medical narrative was almost extinct. This
did not dissuade me, for I felt my roots lay in the great neurological
case histories of the 19th century (and I was encouraged here by the
great Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria). It was a lonely but deeply
satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.

During
the 1990s, I came to know a cousin and contemporary of mine, Robert
John Aumann, a man of remarkable appearance with his robust, athletic
build and long white beard that made him, even at 60, look like an
ancient sage. He is a man of great intellectual power but also of great
human warmth and tenderness, and deep religious commitment —
“commitment,” indeed, is one of his favorite words. Although, in his
work, he stands for rationality in economics and human affairs, there is
no conflict for him between reason and faith.

He
insisted I have a mezuza on my door, and brought me one from Israel. “I
know you don’t believe,” he said, “but you should have one anyhow.” I
didn’t argue.

In
a remarkable 2004 interview, Robert John spoke of his lifelong work in
mathematics and game theory, but also of his family — how he would go
skiing and mountaineering with some of his nearly 30 children and
grandchildren (a kosher cook, carrying saucepans, would accompany them),
and the importance of the Sabbath to him.

“The
observance of the Sabbath is extremely beautiful,” he said, “and is
impossible without being religious. It is not even a question of
improving society — it is about improving one’s own quality of life.”

In
December of 2005, Robert John received a Nobel Prize for his 50 years
of fundamental work in economics. He was not entirely an easy guest for
the Nobel Committee, for he went to Stockholm with his family, including
many of those children and grandchildren, and all had to have special
kosher plates, utensils and food, and special formal clothes, with no
biblically forbidden admixture of wool and linen.

THAT
same month, I was found to have cancer in one eye, and while I was in
the hospital for treatment the following month, Robert John visited. He
was full of entertaining stories about the Nobel Prize and the ceremony
in Stockholm, but made a point of saying that, had he been compelled to
travel to Stockholm on a Saturday, he would have refused the prize. His
commitment to the Sabbath, its utter peacefulness and remoteness from
worldly concerns, would have trumped even a Nobel.

In
1955, as a 22-year-old, I went to Israel for several months to work on a
kibbutz, and though I enjoyed it, I decided not to go again. Even
though so many of my cousins had moved there, the politics of the Middle
East disturbed me, and I suspected I would be out of place in a deeply
religious society. But in the spring of 2014, hearing that my cousin
Marjorie — a physician who had been a protégée of my mother’s and had
worked in the field of medicine till the age of 98 — was nearing death, I
phoned her in Jerusalem to say farewell. Her voice was unexpectedly
strong and resonant, with an accent very much like my mother’s. “I don’t
intend to die now,” she said, “I will be having my 100th birthday on
June 18th. Will you come?”

I
said, “Yes, of course!” When I hung up, I realized that in a few
seconds I had reversed a decision of almost 60 years. It was purely a
family visit. I celebrated Marjorie’s 100th with her and extended
family. I saw two other cousins dear to me in my London days,
innumerable second and removed cousins, and, of course, Robert John. I
felt embraced by my family in a way I had not known since childhood.

I
had felt a little fearful visiting my Orthodox family with my lover,
Billy — my mother’s words still echoed in my mind — but Billy, too, was
warmly received. How profoundly attitudes had changed, even among the
Orthodox, was made clear by Robert John when he invited Billy and me to
join him and his family at their opening Sabbath meal.

The
peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was
palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a
wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?

In
December 2014, I completed my memoir, “On the Move,” and gave the
manuscript to my publisher, not dreaming that days later I would learn I
had metastatic cancer, coming from the melanoma I had in my eye nine
years earlier. I am glad I was able to complete my memoir without
knowing this, and that I had been able, for the first time in my life,
to make a full and frank declaration of my sexuality, facing the world
openly, with no more guilty secrets locked up inside me.

In
February, I felt I had to be equally open about my cancer — and facing
death. I was, in fact, in the hospital when my essay on this, “My Own
Life,” was published in this newspaper. In July I wrote another piece
for the paper, “My Periodic Table,” in which the physical cosmos, and
the elements I loved, took on lives of their own.

And
now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer,
I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual,
but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a
sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the
Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the
seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is
done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

Oliver Sacks was a professor
of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and the
author, most recently, of the memoir “On the Move.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 16, 2015, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Sabbath.

And here are some words from his cousin, Noble Laureate R.J. Aumann mentioned in the above article:

"
Jerusalem - Two weeks ago, in the last essay Oliver Sacks ever
published entitled “Sabbath,” he ruminated about his tenuous
relationship with Judaism and how a serendipitous reunion with a long
lost cousin brought the beauty of the day of rest back into his life.

The cousin in question is Nobel Laureate and Hebrew University of
Jerusalem Prof. Robert J. Aumann, who won the prize in economics in 2005
for his groundbreaking work in game-theory analysis. The two became
close, and Aumann, 85, visited with Sacks a week before he died.

During a Sunday interview in his office at the Hebrew University’s
Center for the Study of Rationality in Givat Ram, Aumann said he vividly
recalled his first memory of Sacks, who he did not know was his cousin
until the early 1990s.

“My son Yonatan read one of his books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife
for a Hat, and without knowing he was related to us, he recommended the
book to me, and I read it and was very much taken by it,” he said. “Then
it dawned on me that he might be related to us.”

Aumann, who holds a visiting professorship at Stony Brook University –
where he is one of the founding members of the university’s Center for
Game Theory – said he looked Sacks up the next time he was in New York,
more than 20 years ago.

In short order, the luminaries determined that they were first cousins, once removed, on Aumann’s maternal side.

“The fact that I didn’t know we were cousins may sound a little strange, but we have a huge family,” Aumann explained.

“My maternal grandfather was the first of 18 children, and Oliver was the son of No. 16, so that’s a lot of people out there.”

“When I went to see him, he was very cordial,” Aumann continued. “And we’ve had a very close relationship ever since.”

Indeed, the two struck up a close friendship, visiting one another
annually in New York, as well as in Israel during Sacks’s last visit to
the country a year ago to celebrate another cousin’s 100th birthday.

In “Sabbath,” Sacks described Aumann as “...a man of remarkable
appearance with his robust, athletic build and long white beard that
made him, even at 60, look like an ancient sage. He is a man of great
intellectual power, but also of great human warmth and tenderness, and
deep religious commitment.”

Knowing that Sacks was nearing the end of his life, Aumann flew to
New York last Sunday to visit the renowned neurologist in his Greenwich
Village apartment to say a last goodbye.

“He asked me what my concept was of Haolam Haba [the afterlife], and we discussed that a little bit,” Aumann said.

“He was preparing for death.
He was very weak, but he was totally lucid.”

“I think he had a longing for religion,” Aumann added.

Although Sacks was raised modern Orthodox by his physician parents in
London, when his mother learned from his father that the teenaged
Oliver was gay, she called her son “an abomination,” and said “I wish
you had never been born.”

The trauma of the encounter resulted in Sacks’s estrangement with Judaism.
“That outburst really hurt him, and I think remained with him for the
rest of his life,” said Aumann. “He even mentioned it in the last essay
he wrote.
Until his death, it made a tremendous impression on him.”

“He wasn’t really religious before that, but of course, he could have
been,” Aumann explained. “I think it’s a little difficult to be
religious and also a homosexual. He never discussed it with me.”

Despite Sacks’s renunciation of religion, Aumann said his cousin still held a deep respect for Judaism.

“I remember once we were sitting in a kosher restaurant in New York
having dinner, and after the meal I benched [said the blessing after the
meal], and when I was done he said, ‘Robert John, that was really
rather fast. You must not race through it; I’m not even sure you said
everything,’” he recalled. “So, he was aware of it, and that indicated
that he hadn’t abandoned [Judaism] entirely. He still had a reminiscence
of it, and I think some kind of longing.

I think that maybe formed part of the attraction, part of the relationship between us.”

If given the chance to eulogize Sacks, Aumann said he would note his cousin’s celebrated empathy and sensitivity.

“He was very sensitive to people and he had an understanding of people – especially people with difficulties,” he said.

“He saw beyond the illnesses – he saw into the souls of his patients.
His main activity in life was being a physician and helping his
patients.”

Additionally, Aumann said Sacks “had a tremendous knack for writing.”

“He was a writer,” he said.

“He was able to take these cases and to make them live in his books.
That was his special ability. There were a lot of physicians around,
lots of neurologists around, but none of them knew how to write like
Oliver.”

It was Sacks’s ability to connect with his patients on a profound
level, and help them through their seemingly insurmountable struggles,
that truly made his cousin great, Aumann concluded.

“He related to them like human beings, not like cases,” he said.

While Aumann said he was not comfortable revealing the details of
their final conversation, he did discuss the powerful final sentence
Sacks wrote in “Sabbath”: “I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath,
the day of rest, the seventh day of the week and perhaps the seventh day
of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and
one may, in good conscience, rest.”

Asked if Sacks achieved his goal of finally resting “in good conscience,” Aumann was unequivocal.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Several very interesting, at times counter-intuitive and different, articles about agriculture and food have been sent to me. Previously I have written about food, farming and Zen practice, especially the relieving of harm and serving being, in "72 Labors Brought Us This Food" as well as elsewhere. Here are excerpts from the recent articles and links.

"Another consequence is that Americans spend less than 10% of their disposable income on food, according to U.S. Agriculture Department data,
while others in many developed countries—including the Netherlands,
Belgium, France and New Zealand—spend at least twice that. People in
less developed countries spend four to eight times as much.

It
may not be politically correct to say so, but Big Agra is far more
productive than are small “family farms,” particularly organic farms.
The yields on these farms, according to recent studies, including in the
science journal Nature, range between 5% and 38% lower than yields on non-organics, depending on individual crop and on tillage method.

The
typical response I get to all this is one of disbelief or insouciance.
To many folk here Big Agra is the enemy, foisting endless amounts of
tasteless food on unenlightened consumers, meanwhile despoiling the
environment through vast quantities of animal waste and excessive use of
herbicides, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

Such
criticisms are debatable. Most experts on food point out that taste is
more related to freshness than to organic or inorganic status or even
production site. Given the high quality of American logistics, fresh,
tasty food produced by large agricultural enterprises is readily
available almost everywhere in the country, even if it is produced
thousands of miles away...."

"Yet the indictment I hear most often is that American food is too
cheap. Many locals point reverently to food journalist and guru Michael Pollan, who suggested in
2010 that we eat less and pay more, specifically, $8 for a dozen eggs
and $3.90 for a pound of peaches in order to support local food systems.
I wonder if the 45.3 million Americans living beneath the poverty
line—14.5% of the country’s population and almost 18% of North
Carolina’s—agree.

The organic sector, while growing, accounted for only 4% of “at home food sales” in 2012—and, perhaps ironically, Costco may already have surpassed Whole Foods as the biggest player in this niche market, with Wal-Mart coming up fast."

(One comment on the article: "No one understands that the U.S. has the same amount of corn acreage as
it did in 1900 but it has 10 times the yields. Most small Africa farm
yields or still stuck at the 1900 level.")

The second article has some surprising and at times almost contradictory perspectives:

"While Monsanto’s 2014 net sales of vegetable
seeds, at $867 million, were a fraction of what it sold in seeds and
traits for corn ($6.4 billion) and soybeans ($2.1 billion), according to
the company’s SEC filing,
Monsanto is building a robust division nonetheless. In 2014, it
included 21 vegetable crops sold in more than 150 countries, allowing
the company to slowly inch its way out of the center of the grocery
store and into the world’s ever busier outer aisles.

Nor is this just about capturing the most
lucrative and discerning broccoli-eaters: The company is setting its
sight on global vegetable domination. “A big part of our focus is
expanding the geographic scope of production in order to achieve a
global market,” Robb Fraley, Monsanto’s executive vice president and
chief technology officer, told Quartz. It’s testing several different
seeds to make sure Beneforté can grow year-round, in different regions
depending on the season, to make for a consistent product that is
available everywhere, all the time. It doesn’t want Beneforté to be the
Champagne of broccoli; it wants it to be the Coca-Cola of broccoli. If
anyone can achieve that with a vegetable, it’s Monsanto. “A big part of our focus is expanding the geographic scope of production in order to achieve a global market.”

Beneforté broccoli and Monsanto’s other
vegetables, like the non-tear-inducing EverMild onion, the smaller
BellaFina bell pepper, and the sweeter Melorange melon, are not
genetically modified organisms (GMOs). They are the results of selective
breeding, the age-old process by which farmers make better crops by
crossing varieties with desirable traits (though as Ben Paynter explained in Wired,
Monsanto’s computer programs have both sped up and replaced much of the
dirty work). Seminis’s technology allowed it to capitalize on the
nutrition research by Beneforté’s original developers, breeding
commercial broccoli varieties that had high levels of a beneficial
compound."

In
addition, she said, a lot of edible food is discarded prematurely
because shoppers misunderstand the purpose of sell-by or use-by dates
stamped on food labels. Infant formula is an exception, but in most
cases, the dates aren’t required by the government, and, according to the USDA, they aren’t a threshold for food safety.

“They are meant to suggest peak quality,” Ms. Gunders said. “It’s
not necessarily that the food will make you sick if you eat it after the
date, but it’s come to be interpreted that way.”

Friday, August 21, 2015

There is an ongoing pattern of anti-Christian (and anti-Yazidi) genocide by Islamic State. Is there anything skillful for us in this?

One suggestion is "Americans are renowned for personal generosity toward the afflicted.
Private charities, churches and individual citizens should challenge the
government to provide visas for Christian refugees whose funding and
care private Americans would guarantee."

Here is the full opinion article titled "Exterminating Christians in the Middle East":

"I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better
information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering
nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not
even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of
slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing
since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so
sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS.
None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers,
politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich
enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise."

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Posted by
Elihu Genmyo Smith
A fundamental aspect of Buddha Practice is seeing what is so and doing what is called for of us. Sometimes we speak of this as insight and skillful actions. "Seeing what is so" is not limited to our usual self-centeredness, our usual dualistic perspective. This is body-mind dropped away, body-mind of self and others forgotten as myriad phenomenon manifest our life; - just this. Skillful actions is manifesting this not-two wisdom and compassion.

Of course, what is called for of us varies according to who, what, where and when. If we are a monk in a practice place what is called for is different than if we are a parent at a child's party is different than if we are a police officer is different than if we are a mayor is different than if we are a carpenter is different than if we are a cook is different than if we are a farmer.

An interesting articulation of this, and to me a surprise to find in this material - whether we agree or disagree with the positions and conclusions - is the following political statement that was sent to me:

"If one thinks Iran will moderate, that contact with the West and a
decrease in economic and political isolation will soften Iran’s hardline
positions, one should approve the agreement. After all, a moderate
Iran is less likely to exploit holes in the inspection and sanctions
regime, is less likely to seek to become a threshold nuclear power after
ten years, and is more likely to use its newfound resources for
domestic growth, not international adventurism.

But if one feels that Iranian leaders will not moderate and their
unstated but very real goal is to get relief from the onerous sanctions,
while still retaining their nuclear ambitions and their ability to
increase belligerent activities in the Middle East and elsewhere, then
one should conclude that it would be better not to approve this
agreement.

Admittedly, no one can tell with certainty which way Iran will go. It is true that Iran has a large number of people who want their
government to decrease its isolation from the world and focus on
economic advancement at home. But it is also true that this desire has
been evident in Iran for thirty-five years, yet the Iranian leaders have
held a tight and undiminished grip on Iran, successfully maintaining
their brutal, theocratic dictatorship with little threat. Who’s to say
this dictatorship will not prevail for another ten, twenty, or thirty
years?

To me, the very real risk that Iran will not moderate and will, instead,
use the agreement to pursue its nefarious goals is too great. "

The above is an excerpt from a statement by US Senator Charles Schumer of New York.

Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in the 1920's. It was his plans for conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union, and the genocide of Jews, Roma and other peoples, much of which came to fruition in WWII and the Holocaust.

At the time he wrote the book, Hitler was in prison for an attempted, and failed, political revolution, so few people took the book seriously. What if people had taken Hitler's proposals seriously, especially after he was released from prison and had a political party and militia but before he gained power? What if the nations of Europe and others had taken the plans for war, conquest and genocide seriously when he came to power in Germany in 1932? What would have been skillful and appropriate to do?

Now, we have a similar situation; "Palestine" by Ali Khamenei has been published in Farsi and soon Arabic.Since I do not read Farsi I must depend upon translations and news reports.

As you read the summary of this book below, keep in mind the questions such as, what is appropriate if this book's proposals are actual plans by those with power to put them into effect? What is skillful? For whom is this skillful and appropriate?

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the Supreme Leader of Iran and thus, in a very different situation from Hitler in the 1920s. He has the power of the state at his command, including the military and especially the Revolutionary Guard.

Below are excerpts from news reports about the book's contents.

"Khamenei claims that his strategy for the destruction of Israel is
not based on anti-Semitism, which he describes as a European phenomenon.
His position is instead based on “well-established Islamic principles.”

One such principle is that a land that falls under Muslim rule, even
briefly, can never again be ceded to non-Muslims. What matters in Islam
is ownership of a land’s government, even if the majority of inhabitants
are non-Muslims.

Along with Israel, this also
includes parts of Russia, many parts of Europe, Thailand, India and parts of
China and the Philippines.

However, according to Khamenei, Israel, which he labels as “enemy” and “foe,” is a special case for three
reasons.

The first is that it is a loyal “ally of the American Great Satan”
and a key element in its “evil scheme” to dominate “the heartland of the
Ummah.”

The second reason is that Israel has waged war on Muslims on a number
of occasions, thus becoming “a hostile infidel,” or “kaffir al-harbi.”

Finally, Israel is a special case because it occupies Jerusalem, which Khamenei describes as “Islam’s third Holy City.”

"Khamenei boasts about the success of his plans to make life
impossible for Israelis through terror attacks from Lebanon and Gaza.
His latest scheme is to recruit “fighters” in the West Bank to set up
Hezbollah-style units.

“We have intervened in anti-Israel matters, and it brought victory in
the 33-day war by Hezbollah against Israel in 2006 and in the 22-day
war between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip,” he boasts.

Khamenei describes Israel as “a cancerous tumor” whose elimination
would mean that “the West’s hegemony and threats will be discredited” in
the Middle East. In its place, he boasts, “the hegemony of Iran will be
promoted.”

"Khamenei says his plan entails low-intensity warfare based on wearing
down the patience of Israelis and the international community. He
writes that this plan does not entail “classical warfare” and he supposedly does not want to kill Jews (though his allies Hezbollah and Hamas seem to act differently).

His plan assumes that all Israelis have dual
citizenship (my comment, this is not true) and would rather live in the US or Europe (my comment, would these nations take another 6 million plus Jews?). He recommends
therefore to make life in Israel so uncomfortable that they leave
voluntarily to avoid threats.

He then describes using the tactic of “Israel fatigue” wherein the
international community would decide to stop supporting Israel’s
military programs."

Khamenei’s book also deals with the Holocaust, which he regards
either as “a propaganda ploy” or a disputed claim. “If there was such a
thing,” he writes, “we don’t know why it happened and how.”

Below are links to reviews of this book. There are many more links, reviews and commentaries to be found on the internet:

"Israel will not survive the next 25 years,
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Wednesday, making a
series of threatening remarks published online.

In
a quote posted to Twitter by Khamenei’s official account, Khamenei
addresses Israel, saying, “You will not see next 25 years,” and adds
that the Jewish state will be hounded until it is destroyed.

The quote comes against a backdrop of a
photograph apparently showing the Iranian leader walking on an Israeli
flag painted on a sidewalk.

“After negotiations, in Zionist regime they
said they had no more concern about Iran for next 25 years; I’d say:
Firstly, you will not see next 25 years; God willing, there will be
nothing as Zionist regime by next 25 years. Secondly, until then,
struggling, heroic and jihadi morale will leave no moment of serenity
for Zionists,” the quote from Iran’s top leader reads in broken English."

"Confrontation With Iran Is Inevitable. Delay only ensures that Iran will be stronger, richer and bolder when the moment comes."

Unfortunately, even President Obama seems to be "caught" by his rhetoric and the truth of the Iran deal and war. Here is an analysis:

"Rather than enumerate every flaw of Barack Obama’s defense of his Iran deal yesterday, we’d like to look deeply at the most glaring one, namely this passage:

Just because Iranian hard-liners chant “Death to America” does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe.

In
fact, it’s those hard-liners who are most comfortable with the status
quo. It’s those hard-liners chanting “Death to America” who have been
most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the
Republican caucus.

Unsurprisingly, that partisan smear, vicious even by Obama’s standards, has drawn a good deal of comment from the right. Fox News
reports that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded a
retraction, and Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican, said: “I
think it’s beneath that office to be able to make these analogies.” A National Review headline asks incredulously: “Is This Seriously a Line from a Speech by the President of the United States?” A Wall Street Journal editorial observes facetiously: “Name-calling and immoral equivalence are always the best way to win over skeptics.”

Surprisingly,
the left has had very little to say about this particular calumny.
There’s probably a forthright defense of it out there somewhere—but we
couldn’t find one, and we looked. The New York Times
editorial board attempted to clean up after the president with this
gentle paraphrase: “He likened Republicans to Iranian hard-liners,
saying both are more comfortable with the status quo.”

That is
inaccurate. What Obama said was that Republicans and “Iranian
hard-liners” are “making common cause.” Not only did he not describe the
former as “comfortable with the status quo,” he explicitly acknowledged
they are not:

Among U.S. policymakers, there’s never
been disagreement on the danger posed by an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Democrats and Republicans alike have recognized that it would spark an
arms race in the world’s most unstable region, and turn every crisis
into a potential nuclear showdown. It would embolden terrorist groups,
like Hezbollah, and pose an unacceptable risk to Israel, which Iranian
leaders have repeatedly threatened to destroy. More broadly, it could
unravel the global commitment to non-proliferation that the world has
done so much to defend.

The question, then, is not whether to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, but how.

According to Obama, there are only two ways of answering that question:

So
let’s not mince words. The choice we face is ultimately between
diplomacy or some form of war—maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months
from now, but soon.

“Let’s not mince words” serves the
same function as “let me be clear”: It prompts the reader to ignore the
mincing of words that immediately follows. The next sentence, all of
two dozen words, includes two maybes. It asserts that a choice we face
“ultimately” will have consequences “soon”—which seems achronological,
though maybe Obama means “soon” relative to the age of the universe.

Most
telling is the equivocation “some sort of war.” Does Obama really think
that by choosing his form of “diplomacy,” America would prevent war of
any sort? No. In fact, he acknowledges it will foment several sorts of
war:

Now, this is not to say that sanctions relief will
provide no benefit to Iran’s military. Let’s stipulate that some of that
money will flow to activities that we object to. We have no illusions
about the Iranian government, or the significance of the Revolutionary
Guard and the Quds Force. Iran supports terrorist organizations like
Hezbollah. It supports proxy groups that threaten our interests and the
interests of our allies—including proxy groups who killed our troops in
Iraq. They try to destabilize our Gulf partners. But Iran has been
engaged in these activities for decades. They engaged in them before
sanctions and while sanctions were in place. In fact, Iran even engaged
in these activities in the middle of the Iran-Iraq War—a war that cost
them nearly a million lives and hundreds of billions of dollars."

"A Better Deal With Iran Is Possible

What is skillful and appropriate? What will lead to less suffering, less violence, less war - short-term and long-term? Is it possible that there are short-term choices which must be made, though unpleasant, that will lead to long-term desired results?

Sunday, August 2, 2015

I have long been interested in quantum biology, biological functioning demonstrating quantum physics. In my book Everything is the Way there is a chapter "Entangling Not-Knowing" which explores this a bit from the perspective of Zen life practice.

I was glad to see a new book Life on the EdgebyJohnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili, a biologist and physicist respectively, explore and clarify some of what we now know of quantum biology. I have not obtained the book as of yet so will reserve further comments about the book itself. Reviews are interesting.

Here are some excerpts from a review which show the depth and breadth of the book:

“ 'Pre-quantum' physics—the laws discovered by Isaac Newton—is often
referred to as classical physics. “Most biologists,” the authors point
out, “still believe that the classical laws are sufficient” to explain
photosynthesis, “with light acting like some kind of golf club able to
whack the oxygen golf ball out of the carbon dioxide molecule.” But,
like Einstein contemplating spooky action at a distance, they are wrong.
The key step in the process involves electrons “hopping” from one
molecule to another. Some extraordinary experiments described in this
book have revealed that this energy is flowing through the plant by, in
effect, following several routes simultaneously, thanks to a phenomenon
known as coherence. This is a purely quantum effect.

This
discovery is particularly exciting because quantum coherence is a
concept that many of the physicists working on the development of
“quantum computers” have incorporated into their designs. Not for the
first time, nature got there before the scientists and so far does a
better job of “computing” the most efficient way to get energy from A to
B. Not that the quantum computer scientists were quick to embrace this
idea: Messrs. McFadden and Al-Khalili quote one of them describing his
colleagues’ immediate reaction when they saw a New York Times article
suggesting that plants might operate as quantum computers: “It’s like,
‘Oh my God, that’s the most crackpot thing I’ve heard in my life.’ ” But
they have since changed their tune."

As to our life and 'consciousness', "Building on ideas proposed by the Oxford physicist Roger Penrose,
Messrs. McFadden and Al-Khalili look at the quantum chemistry that just
might be involved in conscious thought. “The scheme,” they say, “is
certainly speculative, but it does at least provide a plausible link
between the quantum and classical realms in the brain.” After all, if a
plant can operate like a quantum computer in carrying out the process of
photosynthesis, why couldn’t a human brain act as a quantum computer in
carrying out the processes of thought? Given nature’s ability to make
use of whatever is available, it would be surprising if it did not."